ISSUE 158 : Jan/Feb - 2003 - Australian Defence Force Journal

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24 AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE FORCE JOURNAL NO. 158 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 leadership. This article shows that he was only half right. Culture, Organisational Behaviour and Defence Headquarters Cultural features shape behaviour and influence decisions even when (as is typical) the vast majority of members give them no conscious thought. The three Services of the Australian Defence Force have developed distinctive cultures. These differ in some of their specifics but, institutionally and in the motives of their members, the Services are much more alike than they are different. 6 We see this particularly in the contrast between the culture of the mainstream military and that of the Defence bureaucracy. Each of the three Services has what scholars call a “strong” culture because each has a strong sense of identity and clear and measurable functions. In contrast, the identity and functions of “Defence” are less clearly defined. As an institution and as a “culture”, it is an uneasy amalgam of the ethos of the Australian Public Service and the three Services. A large and special pinch of spice is provided by its history, as it developed from four related departments (Defence, Navy, Army and Air Force) to be a single department under the iron leadership of the late Sir Arthur Tange. Newly arrived officers often find themselves confused and disoriented by the significant differences between the mainstream military and Defence Headquarters. Few of the professional competencies that made for career performance in an officer’s early career – decisiveness in decision making, authority in leadership, the ability to adhere to doctrine yet use initiative – have the same utility in Canberra. In mainstream units, officers give orders; in Defence Headquarters, they must often negotiate, frequently in situations that they don’t fully understand. In the unit, even if they had to deal with superiors and rivals outside the unit, at least they feel they knew how these superiors and rivals thought and what their values were; in Defence Headquarters, most of the civilians they deal with have equal or greater authority, usually more bureaucratic savvy, and seem often to have a different agenda which is not always clear. “Rank” or “job level” or even a job title ceases to be any guide to who is influential and who is not; in meetings they are required to cross verbal swords with younger, often sharper, often female counterparts, about whose position and role they may be unsure. Given such differences in working environment, it is little wonder that the average Service officer is professionally and psychologically unprepared for the differences between the mainstream ADF and ADHQ. The priorities, the style, the general “script” for the daily routine: all are so different that it takes some time for them to realise the degree of difference. Many officers attempt to compensate for their disorientation by restructuring the new and unfamiliar problems to conform to problem situations met in their earlier careers. Usually, these attempts take the form of attempts to increase order, focus rationality and improve staff duties. Such an approach gives rise to elaborate networks and hierarchies of directorates and committees, and usually vain attempt by senior officers to “be across” a range of complex and often nebulous issues by an intense form of “busyness”. There are, it is true, many officers for whom Defence Headquarters is a challenge to be relished; even if they don’t become as skilled in the ADHQ as they did in their mainstream units, at least they develop some appropriate competence. But the irony is that few advance their careers by doing so. The quasi “up or out” policy that applies in senior officer career management policy means that there is no benefit of remaining in the bureaucracy and becoming accomplished in its ways. Indeed the opposite is the case. To advance, one must command or at least hold senior staff appointments in a series of headquarters. For all but a few, to remain in the Canberra bureaucracy in a specialist functional field is a serious career disadvantage – indeed, most see it as a prescription for career plateauing. 7 A generation ago, the Public Service executive group in Defence provided some personnel continuity and corporate memory, but this group is now increasingly driven by a generalist career philosophy every bit as powerful
CULTURE AND ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AT AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE HEADQUARTERS 25 as that in the Services. For the last two decades, senior Public Service careers have been shaped by the development of the Senior Executive Service. This SES philosophy “is about introducing flexibility, improving management, increasingly the mobility of senior executives and establishing and cultivating the idea of a coherent and clearly identifiable group of senior executives for various purposes”. 8 Those who staff the higher levels of the Public Service have been encouraged to think of themselves as employable across a range of agencies. Over-identification with one agency is no longer in an ambitious individual’s long-term interests. Recent SES job rotation across the Public Service has thus been almost as high as that of military officers. 9,10 Some commentators have suggested that the disadvantages of this practise could be countered by having would-be Defence executives attend the lengthy mid-career courses set up for their military counterparts. 11 However, it would not be surprising if the contemporary Defence Public Service officer with career ambitions took precisely the opposite view. They have become analogous to the ambitious military generalist, for whom (as we saw earlier) excessive time in a “non-core” staff area such as personnel and materiel is seen as a handicap rather than an asset. Thus the SES career system dictates that the role focus of executives is as much upwards and sideways (to the Minister and to related agencies) as it is downwards (to the “general public” or constituency that an agency services). Hence, as Neil James suggests, current and would-be senior Public Service officers in Defence see attendance at military staff college and the like as “not… important, and rarely essential”. 12 “Paralysis by Analysis” The symptoms of the Defence Headquarters problem were enunciated by Secretary Hawke mainly as political stakeholder dissatisfaction with lack of responsiveness, poor policy development, and lack of empathy with the broad Defence Force constituency. There are a number of reasons why these problems exist in Defence Headquarters. In what follows, we use the Personnel field as the example but other areas provide equally pertinent examples. Defence Headquarters has traditionally been inclined to subject major issues to intense scrutiny. This applies especially in personnel matters. As a consequence, impending action on personnel problems is often put on hold until a fresh strategic level study is done or an implementation team reviews the most recent one. Take, for example, the many major studies on personnel that have been done in the last decade-and-a-half. Since the Australian Parliament’s Cross Committee Report in 1987 made recommendations for change to personnel strategy, 13 a number of major studies of personnel strategy have been mounted within the Defence Force. The Glenn Review had the highest profile of these, and the most resources, but Glenn’s impact was no greater than the token response given to Cross. Most recently, the 2000 Posting Turbulence Review spawned the Action Plan for People, whose recommendations were remarkably similar to those of the Cross Report. In late 2000, the ADF Remuneration (“The Nunn”) Review was launched with a brief that took six months to complete 14 . During this time, no major personnel initiative was allowed to proceed. For an institution that claims – correctly – that its most important resource is its people, the Defence Force has done remarkably little to correct long-standing problems. Despite the many relatively minor programs that have been launched and the many glossy publications that have been printed, the only major personnel initiative from the Services in the last two decades was the introduction of a new superannuation scheme. And, ironically, this new scheme did nothing to assist the Services in tackling retention problems in a turbulent economic era and arguably even impeded them in doing so. All this is illustrative of an implacable pattern of “paralysis by analysis”. Why is this pattern repeated so often What is it about the Defence institution that makes it so difficult to be decisive about personnel Defence can be decisive about new weapons systems (e.g., Collins Class submarines), new information technology systems (e.g., PMKeys), training (e.g., the Defence Force Academy, the Australian Defence
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ISSUE 158 : Jan/Feb - 2003 - Australian Defence Force Journal

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